Yes, that's true, but getting fingerprints from a door knob had exactly zero to do with the comment I replied to, which made the point that filthy 4 year old children and people who don't wash in the bathroom would be spreading swine flu via heavily used thumb print readers.

Well, that clarifies it a bit. I still don't see it as an issue, though. At least it shouldn't be. I'd envision you going to the library and saying, I changed my name, here's my new information and then that print should point to your new identity.

I'm not sure I understand your point. Yes, you can change your legal identity. Are you saying that you wouldn't then provide that new identity to the library to continue checking out books? So, then wouldn't your library card still be connected (or reconnected) to your legal identity?

Or is it that you just want to be able to check out books under a false identity? You might think that's your right, but I certainly think it is my right to know to whom, exactly, I'm loaning something.

Well, presumably, if you present a library card to someone to check out a book, that card acts as a key to your legal identity in a database or filing cabinet of some kind. So, in either case, the end result is that the library has access to your legal identity which you gave them in the first place because you wanted to be able to check out books.

Well then, we'd better hurry up and get rid of door knobs, vending machines, elevator buttons, and the myriad of other things that a lot of people touch on a daily basis. I'm sure that children aren't already touching each others toys, school supplies, desks, etc. already, though, so good catch on this one. In fact, we'd better hurry up and get them all into bubbles before the swine flu gets them!!

Or maybe the librarian could just hit the reader with a little sanitizing wipe every so often. Germ phobia is hardly a reason not to do this. Not when a thumb print reader is just one more thing among a slew of others that a lot of children might touch in a day.

It's not that it could only be enjoyed by people of high intellect, it's that to truly enjoy it, you have to be willing to think. You have to be willing to interpret events and think through their meaning without expecting a bullet list of answers to guide you through the process.

People can start squatting .xxx domains that are common misspellings of porn stuff. It would work like so:

Porn surfer: Ok, lemme check out www.clevelandsteemer.com. Hey, wait a sec.... this is a blog about crocheting. Ooo...doilies...

Phase 3: profit!

It really irks me when I have to have ridiculous passwords on networks that are physically isolated from the outside world. They used to physically assign us passwords for two separate networks (that are not isolated from each other) that were synchronized. Then, the Windows domain got a much stronger password requirement. So, instead of just assigning us a new stronger password synchronized across the two networks, they make us pick a new, ridiculous password for the Windows domain and still assign us a password on the other one, and the Windows passwords change several times per year instead of once like the other network.

So, not only do I have to memorize a new stronger password that changes frequently, but I have to remember another less strict one too. And both on networks where the only way for someone to steal my password is to physically stand there and watch me type it anyway, which is only marginally more difficult while typing a longer password with more special characters in it.

There's nothing stopping you, that's the point.

And what do you mean, who am I to decide it? I didn't decide anything other than to like the way Scrabble has been played for my entire life. Am I wrong for wanting it to stay that way? Who are you to decide that proper nouns should be allowed?

Not only that, but if people really want to use proper nouns, then what's to stop them currently? Because it's not written on the rules paper? Scrabble is about vocabulary, not about knowledge of popular culture.

Most surprising to me is that I even care, but the more I think about it, the more I do. Come on, Mattel!

Hide in the can for five minutes. Or better yet, briskly walk around with a determined look and it will be assumed that you're off doing something relevant. There are plenty of ways to keep the PHBs at bay while you clear your mind for the better.

Or, (since I'd be forbidden from having a water boiler at my desk) simply take a couple of minutes to make the tea and then walk away somewhere quiet for a few minutes. There are a dazzling number of possibilities for things to do to give oneself a break to clear the mind that don't significantly increase the likelihood of chemo and radiation treatments later in life and that don't cause one to drag around a foul stench in the more immediate point in time.

All true. My only thought is maybe it could be useful to cause brief confusion. Or, maybe even the reverse would be useful: instead of spoofing an enemy plane, it would be possible and useful to spoof, say, 100 good guy planes.

As you pointed out, this kind of stuff would be fairly easy to uncover, but even brief moments of confusion can be crucial.

Yes, I do work in defense and no, I never claimed I was a radar engineer. I have some very cursory knowledge of a very specific radar system. I don't need to know how to do the job of a radar engineer to be able to do mine. Last I checked, we're just having a conversation here, not developing the defense capability of tomorrow.

Great points. That's pretty much where my thoughts were going.

People seem to be thinking this thorough as a parallel to what we think of as cyber attacks in the internet world today where viruses and trojans take control of our PCs for nefarious purposes. And while that may be desirable to the Navy too, everything in warfare is moving toward digital communications these days. There are a number of types of tactical data links, communicating virtually everything that one battlefield entity might need to know from another and it's only going to get more widespread over time.

You don't need to "take over" an enemy radar when you can just tell it to report whatever you want to its operator via spoofed waveforms. Or, if a good guy plane could fool others into thinking it was an enemy plane (with a spoofed radar signature, IFF, etc.), the benefits are obvious.

The difficulties are defeating encryption and decoding messages/waveforms to be able to inject specific bits of data as seen fit. Though, a targeted DoS attack is probably not very difficult to achieve even now because if you flood a link with messages of the appropriate size, it still has to do some processing to decide that it can't do anything with them, possibly slowing or stopping legitimate messages.

Incidentally, I work in defense and I don't see my company listed in TFA so that sucks because this would be an interesting project. Though, it might be involved in some way that I just don't know about (because it's a huge company, not necessarily because of secrecy or anything).